Permanentna kriza domaće ekonomije

[Lord Protector]

 

Chaebol vs kereitsu

 

Some chaebol are one large corporation while others have broken up into loosely connected groups of separate companies sharing a common name. Even in the latter case, each is almost always owned, controlled, or managed by the same family group.

South Korea's chaebol are often compared with Japan's keiretsu business groupings, the successors to the pre-war zaibatsu. While the "chaebol" are similar to the "zaibatsu" (the words are cognates, from the same hanja or kanji), some major differences have evolved between chaebol and keiretsu:

• Chaebol are still largely controlled by their founding families while keiretsu are controlled by groups of professional managers. Chaebol, furthermore, are more family based and family oriented than their Japanese counterparts.
• Chaebol are centralized in ownership while keiretsu are more decentralized.
• Chaebol have more often formed subsidiaries to produce components for exports while large Japanese corporations have mostly switched to employing outside contractors.
• The major structural difference between Korean chaebol and the Japanese keiretsu is that chaebol do not all have their own financial institutions. Most were heavily dependent on government loans and loan guarantees in their early years, and they still have a closer relationship with government than their Japanese counterparts. Chaebol are largely prohibited from owning private banks, partly to spread risk and partly to increase the government's leverage over the banks in areas such as credit allocation. In 1990, government regulations made it difficult for a chaebol to develop an exclusive banking relationship, but following the cascading collapses of the late 1990s, it was somewhat relaxed. Keiretsu have historically worked with an affiliated bank, giving the affiliated companies almost unlimited access to credit, so the economic problems for which the Japanese have been known is zombie banks rather than a systemic banking crises. However, many of the largest keiretsu have diversified their debt practices, and public bond sales have become somewhat common.

The chaebol model is heavily reliant on a complex system of interlocking ownership. The owner of the chaebol, with the help of family members, family-owned charity and senior managers from subsidiaries, has to control only three of four public companies, who themselves control other companies that control subsidiaries. A good example of this practice would be the owner of Doosan, who controlled more than 20 subsidiaries with only a minor participation in about 5 companies.

Edited March 14, 2016 by slow

[Tribun_Populi]

mis da jos nisu dobacili ni 10% + nisu dobacili ni 5% proizvodnje rezervnih delova iako su to bili u obavezi...

Nemam pojma, pitam više.

 

Nađoh posle neki članak u Politici gde stoji da je 67% udeo domaćeg rada i komponenti, ali da Rusi jednostavno štite svoje projekte (AvtoVAZ) a izvoz automobila i traktora ionako nije bio feo sporazuma o sl. trgovini.

 

FAS je 33% državni.

 

TT tj. CZ M57

[Prospero]

Ovde nema političke stabilnosti pa shodno tome nije ni mpglo biti konzistentne ekonomske politike na duži rok. Svaka vlada od 2000-te naovamo je bila konglomerat domaćih privatnih krupnokapitalističkih & odgovarajućih stranih interesa, njihov najmanji zajednički sadržalac - gde je proklizavanje u ma jednu stranu dovodilo do automatske reakcije one druge i sledstveno, pada vlade.

 

Sistem ovde fali, kao lebac, onaj koji će da preživi trenutnog jahača apokalipse, onemogućivši mu pritom da okrnji supstancu.

 

TT tj. CZ M57

Da produžimo izborni ciklus na 8 godina, da stabilizujemo sistem a ne da se političari svaki cas svađaju?

 

Ili da čekamo one praaaave političare koji će u sinergiji sa mudrim glavama - evo ne mora Katić, može i dr Komazec - osmisliti novi dugoročni plan ekonomskog razvoja?

 

Uradimo bar nešto, majkumu!

 

by Tapatalk

[Tribun_Populi]

Sistem ovde fali, kao lebac, onaj koji će da preživi trenutnog jahača apokalipse, onemogućivši mu pritom da okrnji supstancu.

;)

Edited March 14, 2016 by Tribun_Populi

[Prospero]

Ja predlažem da dr Sertić, dr Komazec i N. Katić budu članovi komisije sa izvanrednim nadležnostima, da sagledaju sve manjkavosti sistema - ekonomske, pravne, političke - i predlože rešenja uzimajući u obzir i kadrovsku strukturu, da ova zemlja konačno krene napred i zauzme mesto koje joj pripada a koje joj je uskraćeno.

 

 

Neka ne izuzmu ni čaebol ni keirecu iskustva, nije na odmet, ipak se tamo desio 1 razvoj pa treba svemu prići otvorenog uma.

[Lord Protector]

Ja predlažem da dr Sertić, dr Komazec i N. Katić budu članovi komisije sa izvanrednim nadležnostima, da sagledaju sve manjkavosti sistema - ekonomske, pravne, političke - i predlože rešenja uzimajući u obzir i kadrovsku strukturu, da ova zemlja konačno krene napred i zauzme mesto koje joj pripada a koje joj je uskraćeno.

 

 

Neka ne izuzmu ni čaebol ni keirecu iskustva, nije na odmet, ipak se tamo desio 1 razvoj pa treba svemu prići otvorenog uma.

 

Kasno je za to. Što Dinkara&Co upokoji to ni menadžment Samsunga ne podiže...

[Luther]

Хајмо поново лутере.

 

На твојој стастици, не улазим да ли је тачна сама сатиситка плата, курс рубље.........

Dobro zar tebi ne zaigta srce od radosti što spski trudbenik ima veću platu od trudbenika jedne velesile tj. ruskog? I zašto ovo uporno negiraš argumentima priučenog ruskog bota. Podatak plate u rubljama je zvanični ruski, kurs sa zvaničnog sajta ruske centralne banke na određeni dan kad se vrši obračun i prezentira statistika. Izvor wiki. Kako može drugačije. Zajednička mera za poređenje plata je evro a ne nafta ili prasići ili neki tvoji fiktivni procenti nečega. I to zato što  evro možeš da zameniš za realnu robu a ti pogledaj koliko je realno opala kupovna moć u Rusiji za godinu dana  . Tačno, ruske plate u evrima su se strmoglavile sa 800 na ovo sada pa šta stim. Govorimo o sadašnjem trenutku zbog koga sam ja srećan. A ti?  Šta će biti u budućnosti ni ti ni ja ne znamo.Rusiju si u priču ti uveo kao velesilu pa kad je već tako da vidimo kako stoje.

 

Za USA nisam rekao da nije bilo protekcionizma nego da to nije razlog njihovog neviđenog razvoja. Stalno brkaš korelaciju i kauzalnost i tu izgleda nema pomoći

 

I dalje uporno odbijaš da mi objasniš otkuda ti pojam pozlaćeni period. Naravno tvoje je pravo da ne odgovoriš ali me ovo baš jako interesuje. Ja sam čitao dosta razne literature na srpskohrvatskom, uglavnom Blek Stenu i Zagora(Kapetan Mark mi je nekako previše intelektualan)  i nikada se sa njim nisam susreo. 

 

.

[Luther]

:D

 

Rekoh vec, pa da ponovim: ne znas......

Opet ti Amerikanci i Brazilijanci, Evropejanci i Klingonijanci. Kako ti ne dosadi više? Rumuni i Bugari braćo i sestre, Rumuni i Bugari. Pa i tu smo već mnogo okasnili i možemo samo neke mrvice da skupljamo.

Zvaničnici kompanije kažu da radnici „Dačije“ zarađuju dvostruko više u odnosu na prosječnu platu od 1.900 leja /470 dolara/, prenosi AP.

 

Više od 90 odsto automobila se izvozi. Menadžeri tvrde da je „Dačija“ prodala 550.000 automobila 2015. godine

http://www.balkans.com/sr/open-news.php?uniquenumber=211505

 

Od toga što si ti zaboravio o autoindustriji više nego što zna celo čovečanstvo nećemo se najesti leba i pečenja. To ostavi za gusle uz logorsku vatru. Nego jel znaš ti ta auta da praviš? Daj neku studiju izvodljivosti, neki projekat. Evo na forumu ima i političara i bankara pa informatičara i pravnika. Svi da te podrže i da se konačno krene sa mrtve tačke. Ako ne znaš da praviš auta daj bilo šta samo da počnemo da se razvijamo  

 

[Luther]

Da produžimo izborni ciklus na 8 godina, da stabilizujemo sistem a ne da se političari svaki cas svađaju?

 

Ili da čekamo one praaaave političare koji će u sinergiji sa mudrim glavama - evo ne mora Katić, može i dr Komazec - osmisliti novi dugoročni plan ekonomskog razvoja?

 

Uradimo bar nešto, majkumu!

 

by Tapatalk

Malo je 8 godina. Cela ova priča sa "nepolitičkim sistemom"( nešto  što je Pilja Marković zvao bezpartijska demokratija) donose vetrovi čije poreklo nije u Južnom moru već u nešto bližim a znatno hladnijim predelima. Tamo gde je predsednik drževe beskonačno na vlasti, gde se održavaju ritualni izbori a opozicioni lideri ubijaju na ulici kao šugavi psi. E to je ta stabilnost koja se traži. Kada sam malo guglovao o Katiću da vidim njegove stavove odjednom su počele da ispadaju razne sukomarčne spodobe koje propagiraju tu meritokratiju po lokalnim televizijama i tribinama.Recimo ovo:

 

A iznad svih treba da bude taj veličanstveni um i ta čvrsta ruka:

 

E to nam treba.

 

(Mada, slažem se delimično sa TP da su  politička nestabilnost i slabe vlade  bitno doprinele lošim ekonomskim ishodima ali ne samo kao eksponenti raznih interesa već populističkim popuštanjem svim mogućim grupacijama te shodno tome izbegavanjem nepopularnih mera. I to  

samo do 2008.)

[Prospero]

300 Srba, to je bar 10ak čaebolova za dizanje Srbije iz neoliberalnog pepela.

 

Slowe povedi, Tribune pomozi!

[Lord Protector]

Luter je pokupio random klipove u nedostatku argumenata, Prospero loše prikriva ogorčenost zbog poraza u diskusiji nategnutim 'humorom', nigde ozbiljne priče.

Edited March 14, 2016 by slow

[hazard]

Ruska dozvola OK, ali zašto Rusi ne dozvoljavaju, to je valjda "srpski" proizvod? Ili ipak ne? Da li vrednost ovde izvedenih radova i ovde proizvedenih komponenti vozila prebacuje 50%?

 

TT tj. CZ M57

 

Sporazum o slobodnoj trgovini izmedju Rusije i Srbije ne odnosi se na automobile, tj. ne pokriva svaku klasu proizvoda.

[Tribun_Populi]

A jbg, meni ovaj mindfuck već počinje ozbiljno da ide na ganglije.

 

Takav sistem, što dolazi sa severoistoka, ćete svejedno dobiti. Malo zato što ga ta vaša religija koju gorljivo zagovarate tj. njeni ekonomski rezultati - uporno priziva, a malo i zato što je to 1 evropski trend. Koliki će od ta dva pojedinačni doprinos biti neam pojma, ali u zbiru se smeši jedna solidna diktaturica. Krupnog kapitala. Takoreći korporativna država.

 

A vi zbijajte pošalice i pravite skečeve, sve se međusobno gicajući.

 

TT tj. CZ M57

[hazard]

Hoces da kazes da je sustina u nedostatku dobrog R&D.

 

Hoću da kažem da je suština očigledno u nedostatku volje, motivacije, sposobnosti, čega li već...da, Zastavi je nedostajao R&D ali je pitanje zašto? Kako su ga Korejci razvili pod sličnim uslovima dok je Zastava u suštini džabalebarila u poređenju s njima?

 

Možemo reći, OK, to je zato što smo imali samoupravni socijalizam pa je radnicima bilo bitno da dobiju veće plate, novogodišnji paketić, polutke i da idu na radničke igre, da prave novo odmoralište za sebe na jadranskoj obali umesto da razvijaju novi model, dok su Koreanci imali svoje zle alave kapitaliste. Međutim, dok to svakako pravi razliku, već smo apsolvirali da nisu baš o svemu odlučivali radnici, naročito u velikim firmama poput Zastave, kao da su kod Srba zli kapitalisti kada su se pojavili bili sasvim zadovoljni time da eksploatišu u besvest lokalni monopol i da sede na tim parama. Nešto ne vidim da je Mišković osvojio Evropu i svet koristeći monopol u Srbiji kao odskočnu dasku...proširio se na CG (dok je to još uvek bio deo iste države kao i Srbija), na Bosnu nešto sitno i kupio jedan manji lanac u Bugarskoj (inače uglavnom promašene investicije, što se vidi po kasnijem povlačenju Deleza sa tih tržišta). Muzeo je dok je mogao, kada više nije bio sposoban da time upravlja (što pokazuje 300 plus miliona evra duga koji je imao prema dobavljačima u trenutku prodaje), iskeširao se iz priče prodavši sve Belgijancima.

 

Dakle Koreanci i Japanci i Kinezi i ostala azijska bratija je očigledno imala neku želju, a i sposobnost, da postane svetski igrač. I postali su. To je očigledno daleko bitnija komponenta njihovog uspeha od protekcionizma i etatizma u ekonomiji. Što bi rek'o onaj Ciga iz vica o večito propadajućoj samoupravnoj fabrici koja svaki put kupuje nove mašine pa završava na istom, ,,imala moja baba javnu kuću...pa kad nije iš'o pos'o, nije menjala krevete nego kurve". 

[Prospero]

Ne mogu da vas pohvatam, eskapistički lutate od samoupravljanja do čaebola

 
 
Evo ovako ozbiljno, pa nađite paralele i vidi gde se to preklapa sa Srbijom danas (niđe):
 
 

 

The chaebol and the US military–industrial complex: Cold War geopolitical economy and South Korean industrialization

Jim Glassman

Young-Jin Choi

 

...

Introduction
 
On 17 January 1964, as the administration of US President Lyndon B Johnson (LBJ) was intensifying its war effort in Vietnam, the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense, Roswell Gilpatrick, issued a news release announcing it would conduct classified briefings for industry on its long-range buying (procurement) and development plans.(1) The Gilpatrick Memorandum, as it was called in the news release, “was addressed to the military departments and to the Heads of Defense Agencies engaged in development activities”, and noted that the industries to be invited to the six briefings during the first half of 1964 were aircraft, arms and ammunition, chemicals and biologicals, electronics, missiles, and nuclear products, while those to be invited to the six briefings during the second half of the year were clothing, internal combustion power, mechanical products, research, shipbuilding, and ground transportation. These briefings were to “provide industrial leadership with a DOD-wide picture of longrange development and procurement needs”, including projected shifts in development and procurement plans. While the range of industries to be briefed might imply a broad program of information, the process was in fact highly selective: briefings were classified, no more than three people from the management of each corporate office were allowed to attend (owing to “the high-level approach being taken”), and firms were limited to those able “to obtain a suitable security clearance through the host department”, thus favoring those that already held R&D contracts with the Department of Defense (DOD).
 
While there is nothing particularly surprising about this announcement, it can be used precisely for that reason to make a basic point about US defense contracts: participation in US military procurement is typically limited to specific, well-positioned firms in key industries and does not abide by the idealized principles of a ‘free-market’. This fact, however, makes the story we analyze in this paper somewhat surprising. Defying the general procurement constraints, crucial South Korean industrial conglomerates, chaebol, began to engage in enormous amounts of offshore procurement (OSP) contracting for the US military, from the Vietnam War era forward, effectively becoming players within the US military–industrial complex (MIC). This was a unique outcome, even among US Cold War allies, and we will argue that it significantly shaped South Korea’s prodigious industrial transformation.
 
...
 
Our analytical lens, of course, relates to how we view the South Korean developmental state and the replicability or desirability of its policies. Among the ‘first tier’ of Asian newly industrializing countries (NICs) that began growing rapidly in the 1950s–1970s, South Korea emerged as the base for an especially powerful, transnationally active capitalist class, this being the direct result of not only developmental state policies but the geopolitical moment that made these policies viable, including unstinting US support for the South Korean Cold War state. One form of that unstinting support was a vast OSP program targeting South Korean firms, and we focus here especially on the role of OSP in the growth of South Korean construction firms, with Hyundai at the center of our story. As we see it, the importance of OSP to Korean construction industry growth calls into question the replicability of South Korea’s industrial performance in contexts where OSP is not so readily forthcoming; and given the death toll in Vietnam that went along with the US war effort, we also implicitly question the desirability of the ‘East Asian development model’, dependent as it was on the activities of the US MIC.
 
To position our argument, we start by briefly noting how the role of geopolitics in East Asia’s industrial transformation has been neglected. While a very small number of works on East Asian developmental states, particularly Jung-en Woo’s Race to the Swift (1991), have provided important details, we show that two key paradigm-forming neo-Weberian accounts have downplayed the importance of geopolitics and OSP to the political economy of East Asian development. We thus argue the need to go beyond these conventional developmental state arguments to clarify the significance of geopolitics for East Asian growth, and we do so empirically by placing the Korean developmental state’s projects in the larger frame of global geopolitical economic manoeuvres undertaken by actors within the US MIC. The fact that key Korean actors began to play roles within this complex, given the typical limitations on military contracting opportunities, is of great historical interest. The fact that it can be argued to have had great significance for South Korea’s patterns of industrial transformation makes the case of considerable theoretical and political moment as well.
 
...
 
The Vietnam War and South Korea’s take-off
 
Among the first tier of Asian NICs, South Korea emerged after World War II as the base for an especially powerful, transnationally active capitalist class, and this was the direct result of both highly militarist developmental state policies and the geopolitical processes that made these policies viable. Some crucial chaebol such as Samsung, founded by a Korean industrialist who developed his business under Japanese colonialism, grew primarily on the basis of revived connections with Japanese capital and the US market. These were made possible in part by intensive US lobbying and triangular political manoeuvring between US, Korean, and Japanese leaders who had to overcome popular South Korean opposition to normalization of relations with Japan (Chibber, 2003, page 324). Other chaebol, such as the shipping giant, Hanjin, and the construction and industrial behemoth, Hyundai, grew dramatically as the result of US OSP and the opportunities for windfall profits and technological upgrading that these contracts provided—as well as the opportunities to subdue industrial labor created by the Cold War state (Hart-Landsberg, 1993; Kim and Park, 2007; Koo, 2001; Ogle, 1990). In this sense, one segment of the post-World-War-II Pacific ruling class (cf van der Pijl, 1984) connected the US MIC and its capitalists—such as LBJ’s construction cronies at Brown&Root (Chatterjee, 2009, pages 23–28; Gardner, 1995, pages 8–9)—first to Japanese capitalists and then South Korean capitalists, such as Chŏng Chu-yŏng of Hyundai, as well as to the Japanese and Korean developmental states. Here, we outline some details of this process of alliance formation as it enrolled Korean capital in the US MIC from the early years of US intervention in Vietnam.
 
In May 1964 the Johnson administration authored National Security Action Memorandum 298, calling for study of the possible redeployment of a US Division from Korea to Hawaii.(2) This was part of an overall military reappraisal that resulted in the shifting of forces toward Southeast Asia and a planned reduction in the military items the US allowed its allies to purchase through its Military Assistance Program (MAP)—this shift being called the MAP transfer program.(3) The consequences of both reduced troop levels and MAP transfer were seen by the highly militarized regime of Park Chung Hee as financially serious. Thus, military reconfiguration and rearrangement of military spending became crucial items in US–South Korean diplomacy.
 
In this context the Park regime made an offer that turned out to be highly consequential for the resources of the Korean developmental state and the chaebol. By 1964 South Korea had already sent a mobile army surgical hospital (MASH unit) to Vietnam, and it augmented this in early 1965 with 2416 noncombatant troops (Kim, 1990, page 233). Korean commitments to support the US war effort in Vietnam developed in the context of the Johnson administration’s “more flags” program, inaugurated in April 1964 as an attempt to gain more international support for the US-backed regime in Saigon (Hatcher, 1990, pages 57–58; Kahin, 1987, page 332; Yi, 2000, page 156). With this program failing to generate much commitment among US allies in Southeast Asia, Park made himself more valuable to the LBJ administration by offering to send a combat unit to Vietnam. Earlier feelers regarding US interest, floated by former Prime Minister Kim Hyun-chul, had been discouraged by the US Embassy; and US Secretary of State Dean Rusk originally rejected Park’s more formal offer, noting—among other reasons—that the US had yet to send combat troops of its own, but suggesting that Korean special forces personnel could play useful roles as advisors and trainers.(4) Nonetheless, Park’s move struck a responsive chord in Washington since it offered something tangible to the US Cold War state—something not being offered by Japan or US Southeast Asian allies (Kim, 1990, pages 249–255; Yi, 2000, pages 156–157).
 
By 1965, US planners began to take seriously the prospects for employing foreign troops in Vietnam. When Park’s 1965 state visit to Washington was in the offing, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy suggested to US military leaders the utility of employing ground troops from Australia, the Philippines, South Korea, Thailand, and possibly Pakistan (Gardner, 1995, page 182). After LBJ’s April 1965 commitment of US ground troops, his administration arranged a June meeting between US and Korean military leaders, leading to an official request for Korean support from the South Vietnamese government and, finally, to a vote for Korean troop commitments by the South Korean parliament in August (Kim, 1990, page 249; Yi, 2000, pages 154–157). In this process, Park did not merely offer the services of Korean troops in Vietnam but negotiated to gain pay levels for enlisted men that were twenty-two times regular Korean military pay (Kahin, 1987, page 335; see also Kim, 1970). This would allow Korean troops to send US dollars home to Korea, and would help make up some of the economic losses that would be incurred if US troops were removed from South Korea (Yi, 2000, pages 159–161).
 
Notwithstanding the lack of a ringing democratic mandate, Park’s position was strengthened, especially in relation to the United States, and as the final arrangements for Korean troop deployments to Vietnam were made, Brown changed his tune and began to move toward Park’s position in favour of special OSP opportunities. In a September 23 memorandum to the Director of USAID, Brown made a pitch for understanding South Korea’s unique situation:
 
       “Korea is providing a full combat division plus a non-combat engineering unit to Vietnam. While the ROKG [Republic of Korea Government] and the U.S. have repeatedly maintained that such action was based on Korea’s own interests in the war in South Vietnam and its responsibilities to the Free World, there is inevitably the feeling within Korea, and particularly in the Assembly, that Korea should receive some tangible trade benefits from its willing response to the request for troops. This feeling is fortified by the feeling that persists in Korea that Japan profited greatly economically from the Korean War. Korea now sees an opportunity to capitalize itself on the economic consequences of the Vietnam engagement. But, equally important, Korea sees an implication that while Korea is contributing troops to the war, Japan may once again be making large profits through U.S. offshore procurement.” (11)
 
By December 1965, as the Johnson administration awaited the arrival in Vietnam of the first Korean combat troops and requested even more (Yi, 2000, page 168), Brown pushed further, in a cable to the Department of State:
 
       “f the Koreans make this further troop contribution, it will be utterly impossible for them to understand why there can be no preferred treatment for them in matters economic, especially as they relate to SVN [south Vietnam]. They will be making a contribution in the irreplaceable commodity of human life, and doing so on a scale utterly disproportionate to the contributions of their competitors, particularly Japan. In such a case, the assurance of equal treatment with these competitors seems small recompense … . It seems to me that we are being faced with a political and human problem directly related to a bloody war in which we are deeply committed, to the solution of which our normal commercial policy and peacetime procurement must also make their contribution.” (12)
 
In reality, what Brown was starting to propose was not “normal commercial policy” or “equal treatment” but a convenient bending of official procurement rules. This became evident when on January 19, 1966 he noted in a cable to the State Department that “Preferred treatment for Korea under OSP program becoming one of most important issues in negotiations with ROKG to obtain decision dispatch troops.” (13) On January 27, Rusk cabled Brown with a summary of what the United States proposed as part of these negotiations, including the following:
 
       “To procure in Korea, in competition only with US suppliers, as much as Korea can provide and in time at a reasonable price, a substantial amount of goods being purchased by [uS] AID for use in its project program for rural construction, pacification, relief, logistics, and so forth, in RVN [Republic of Vietnam] … . To the extent permitted by RVN, to provide Korean contractors expanded opportunities to participate in construction projects undertaken by USG and American contractors in RVN and to provide other services … . Additionally, parallel employment of skilled Korean civilians in RVN can provide sizeable foreign exchange earnings.” (14)
 
These proposals from the State Department, which allowed Korean firms opportunities to bid on OSP contracts without competition from Japan or other non-US firms, became the basis of the “Brown memorandum”, a March 4 letter from Brown to Foreign Minister Yi Tong-wŏn, outlining a whole series of special economic concessions the US government was willing to make to Korean economic and military actors (Baldwin, 1975, pages 36–37; Subcommittee on United States Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad, 1970, pages 149–150). As we will show, the consequences of this agreement were substantial for both the Korean developmental state and the Korean chaebol.
 
...
 
Hyundai received contracts during this period to build US Army barracks and to expand the national airport. Both the profits and the experience that Hyundai gained from this—including the upgrading of its engineering skills under the tutelage of the US Army Corps of Engineers—allowed it to expand its construction operations and become South Korea’s most powerful construction and heavy industry conglomerate (Jones and Sakong, 1980, pages 356–357).(15) Still, in the 1950s, Hyundai was primarily a domestically oriented chaebol, undertaking projects within Korea. In the 1960s it was to rapidly become a much more internationalized firm, one of the world’s best-known construction and heavy industry companies.
 
How this occurred is directly related to Hyundai’s relationship with the US military. Having already developed good relations during the Korean War, Chŏng was able in the 1960s to gain contracts for World Bank and US military projects in Thailand, Vietnam, and Guam, as the US military expanded its war effort in Southeast Asia. The experience and capital accumulated through these projects allowed Hyundai to undertake more infrastructure projects in South Korea during the same decade, and by the 1970s it had expanded further to undertake major construction projects in the Middle East (Hyundai, 1982, pages 1207–1209; Jones and Sakong, 1980, pages 357–358). Most impressively, in the 1970s, Hyundai expanded into shipbuilding, a field in which it had no previous experience and which it was reputedly exhorted to master by Park Chung Hee (Cumings, 2005, pages 323–324; Jones and Sakong, 1980, pages 357–358).
 
However crucial was this backing and exhortation from the Korean state, the role of the US military and Cold War state looms especially large in Hyundai’s development. Amsden’s account, as noted, emphasizes the early financial spur provided to Hyundai by large US OSP contracts. But the role of the US military was even more substantial than this quantitative contribution, as can be explained by several sometimes noted but little-analyzed chapters in Hyundai’s history, the first being the firm’s construction of the Pattani–Narathiwat Highway in southern Thailand during 1965–68.
 
...
 
Clearly, with OSP and MAP collectively equalling between 40% and 60% of South Korea’s gross capital formation during the late 1960s, their significance for the ramping up of Korea’s industrial ‘take-off’ was enormous. We want to emphasize, however, two qualitative claims embedded in the quantitative data. First, as we have shown, OSP has a significance that goes well beyond the volume of capital it pumps into economies, though the volume is by no means irrelevant. OSP provides a direct subsidy—and protected market opportunity—to specific industrial firms, thus contributing in tangible ways to the very processes of learning, development of engineering skills, and technological upgrading that are core concerns for developmental states and their theorists. As such, we think the enormous windfalls to Korean firms from Cold War era OSP need to be counted among the crucial conditions for the success of both Korean chaebol and the Korean developmental state.
 
Second, and related to the first point, we have shown the amounts of Korean OSP and MAP compared with the figures for Thailand and the Philippines to make a broader point about both the regional economy and the South Korean developmental state. We have emphasized the transnational dimensions of Korean dynamism, and in figures 4 and 5 what we also illustrate is that this dynamism was part of a hierarchical regional process in which not all players within the Cold War alliance were equal (see Bernard and Ravenhill, 1995; Cumings, 1984; Hart-Landsberg and Burkett, 1998). The US Cold War state was clearly the dominant player, even though it could not simply dictate terms to regimes like Park’s. Japanese elites played the role of silent regional subhegemon, gaining in fact a much larger share of OSP than Korea, though this was far less important to Japan’s overall economy by the late 1960s because of its much greater size (Havens, 1987, pages 102–106).
 
Among the Asian allies that provided troops to the US war effort, South Korean elites benefited the most. Korean industrial firms’ receipt of especially large amounts of OSP— even long after the Vietnam War was over—both reflected their significance as regional allies in the 1960s and helped to further their regional position by the 1980s. Even though firms like Hyundai were relatively small players in the early 1960s, they were better connected than any industrial firms in Thailand, where the economy was far more dominated by Sino– Thai merchant capital, agribusiness, and bankers (Glassman, 2004; Hewison, 1989). These differences were in turn amplified by the Vietnam War and OSP: while Korean construction firms sucked in large amounts of OSP and began to assert themselves as powerful regional players, Thailand gained economic and military assistance that spurred rapid economic growth, but without undergoing a similarly dynamic industrial transformation. Naya’s study confirms how the Vietnam War economy helped consolidate this differential pattern: 75% of the value of Thai exports to Vietnam came from rice, while for South Korea most exports were manufactured goods, including many ‘new industrial products’, with Vietnam absorbing 94% of Korean exports of steel products and 52% of exports of transport equipment (1971, pages 42–45). The consequences of these kinds of differential development trajectories are obvious to most observers today (see Doner, 2009): while firms like Samsung, Hyundai, LG, and Hanjin are not just Korean but global brand names, there are no comparable, globally recognized Thai industrial firms.
 
...
 
We have argued that the dynamic growth and industrial transformation of the South Korean economy—and especially its crucial construction firms—are attributable not only to the actions of the Korean developmental state but to the effects of a Cold War geopolitical economy that made access to technological and engineering learning opportunities available to South Korean contractors on unusually favorable terms. In saying this we deny neither the very active role of the South Korean state in this process nor the successful efforts of South Korean firms and their workers to take advantage of the opportunities; rather, we emphasize crucial processes buttressing these efforts that are largely missed or downplayed in most neoWeberian accounts, especially the role of OSP and the induction of South Korean firms into the US MIC.

 

In doing this, we have tried to show that conceptually and methodologically it is useless to partition the economic performance of states like South Korea from geopolitics and transnational class issues. Statist analyses of the ways policies guide the market are superior to neoliberal arguments in this regard, but they do not go far enough. Economic development in East and Southeast Asia has been shot through with the same kinds of class power and destructive military violence that have accompanied capitalist industrial transformation elsewhere in the world over many centuries. A geopolitical economic analysis of East Asian development that makes the enrolment of Asian states in the US MIC a centerpiece of industrial transformation provides one important corrective to this absence of war from the story of East Asian industrialization. As such, it also provides a corrective to the antiseptic political recommendations for building developmental states that often follow from such geopolitical silences.